Useful Linux commands for beginners

What is and how to start terminal

Linux is very powerful and friendly once when you know what do you need and how to do it. I recommend you to have a small cheat sheet. This will give you confidence and will speed up your learning curve. The windows analog of terminal is Command Prompt. The difference is that Linux terminal is much more feature rich and can do almost everything.

Special symbols

/ - root. The root folder is the parent of all other folders in Linux. You can think of it like C:/ drive in windows if you have only one drive.

. - A dot symbol represent current folder

~ - This is used for home directory. Usually in linux the structure is :

/home/user/
/home/user1/
/home/user2/

windows equivalent would be something like:

C:\Users\user\
C:\Users\user1\
C:\Users\user2\

Shortcut

Before to start you need to launch terminal window by(depending on your distro):

CTRL + ALT + T - for Ubuntu and Linux Mint

ALT + F2 then type gnome-terminal

Super + T - super is windows button

CTRL + ALT + F1

There are several terminal types but this is not important for the new users.

Menu

You can started it also from the menu:

Linux Starter command pack

General

Do as super user:

usually when you don't have rights to do something you will get an error like this:

mv text.txt text1.txt: Permission denied

Sometimes you need administrator privileges in order to do something in linux. You can get then by several ways. On of them is to add sudo infront of the command:

sudo mv text.txt text1.txt

Log with other user:
Sometimes you need to change the logged user by(newuser is the name of the new one) :

su - newuser

See running processes:
When you are in doubt you can refer to the manual by:

top

Check used memory:
When you are in doubt you can refer to the manual by(in MBs or GBs):

free -m
free -g

Check disk space:
When you are in doubt you can refer to the manual by: